The Transatlantic Alliance:
The Impact of America’s Pivot and Europe’s Financial Crisis

This regional seminar provided participants with a fundamental understanding of NATO and European Union institutions, as well an evaluation of the transatlantic partnership. The United States is pivoting its security focus towards Asia at a time when the European Union is weathering an unprecedented financial crisis that challenges its very legitimacy. These crosscurrents give us pause to ponder the geopolitics of the moment. Can Europe expand its role in NATO and what would that mean for its operations? Which countries would likely move towards a leadership role? What happens to the NATO pooling and sharing arrangements? Additionally, Russia has long lobbied for Europe to move beyond NATO as a security framework. Does the current environment create a new Russian opportunity to inject itself into the region’s foreign, economic, and security vectors? Meanwhile, the European Union faces additional challenges. The daisy-chain of global financial crises that has hammered Europe over the last half decade has challenged its regional system of governance and the very logic of the Union itself. The European Commission believes the EU is stronger and the ECB has been enhanced by the crisis. Meanwhile, European financial policies—largely in the form of austerity measures imposed upon supposed sovereign states by a supranational troika—have contributed to the growth of opposition to the European project in the form of reactionary nationalist projects, as well as youth and immigrant protest movements. In such a context how will a post-Lisbon European Union respond to issues such as the implications of the Cyprus Settlement and T-TIP?

Through the seminar, participants:

Examine the current resource environment for NATO and the EU in the age of uniform transatlantic policies of austerity.

Assess leadership options within NATO and its meaning to future NATO operations.

Review the current structure and political processes within NATO and the EU, including the Post-Lisbon adaptations to European political processes

Analyze the impact of the “democracy deficit” on national politics of member states (MS).

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